The Greatest Hits: The Best Restaurants I Have Ever Eaten At
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jun 26
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Anthony Bourdain once said that food is everything we are. It is an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma.
I believe that. Which is why the restaurants on this list are not simply places where I ate well. They are places where I understood something — about a country, a culture, a landscape, a person — that I could not have understood any other way.
This is my collection of the finest restaurants I have ever had the privilege of dining at. My food journey spans 37 countries, five continents, and decades of traveling with the specific intention of eating extraordinary food. Some restaurants in this post hold Michelin stars. Some hold a place on the World's 50 Best list. Some hold neither, and belong here anyway.
What they share is this: I am still thinking about them. The meals live in my memory with a specificity and clarity that most experiences do not. That is the only qualification that matters.
This list will continue to grow. These are the ones so far.
Best Restaurants Worth Traveling For: A World Bucket List
The United States
Chicago's only three-Michelin-star restaurant and one of the most decorated dining establishments in the world. A 13-course journey through food as performance art — the bubblegum cigar, the floating green apple balloon, the Hot Potato Cold Potato dish that has become one of the most iconic creations in American culinary history. I carried this meal in my imagination for over a decade before I ate it. It exceeded every expectation. Chef Grant Achatz is not cooking food. He is creating experiences that happen to involve eating.
One of the most memorable meals I have ever eaten wasn't memorable simply because it tasted extraordinary. It was memorable because every course told a story. Hidden in the waterfront town of Kemah, thirty miles southeast of Houston, Th_Prsrv is the collaboration of James Beard Award semifinalist Chef Jabthong "G" Benchawan Painter and Chef David Skinner, who drew upon their Thai and Choctaw heritage to build a tasting menu that unfolds chronologically from 2400 B.C. to the present day. Each dish represents a different historical moment, tracing how trade routes, migration, and colonization transformed two extraordinary culinary traditions over five millennia. The Day and Night dish — sweet corn and pumpkin porridge against black tepary beans and vegetable ash, divided by smoked fish — was my favorite dish of the year I ate it. This restaurant proves that remarkable dining experiences can flourish far from the country's largest cities.
I was sitting in Mexico — on the Pacific coast, watching fishing boats return with the morning catch — when I found myself thinking about a seafood counter inside a food hall in Los Angeles. That is the measure of what Holbox does to you. Chef Gilberto Cetina built a Michelin-starred, World's 50 Best restaurant around the marisquerías of Mexico's coasts, with uni ceviche served in a sea urchin shell, tostadas raspadas so light they shatter, and smoked kanpachi that stops conversation mid-bite. No reservations. No tablecloths. No compromise whatsoever.
Thomas Keller opened Bouchon in 1998 in Napa Valley's Yountville, named after the traditional bouchons of Lyon — casual neighborhood restaurants celebrated for honest, comforting cooking. Nearly thirty years later, the escargot are still my benchmark, the duck confit still shatters beneath the fork, and the truffle frites are still worth the drive from anywhere in the Bay Area. Some restaurants earn their place on a list like this through a single extraordinary meal. Bouchon earns it by delivering the same extraordinary meal, reliably, every single time.
Bakeries rarely inspire pilgrimage. Great restaurants do. But every so often a bakery produces something so extraordinary that people willingly stand in line for an hour, carry boxes of pastries onto airplanes, and rearrange travel itineraries just to visit. Arsicault is one of those places — and the first bakery to earn a place in this series. Bon Appétit named it America's Best New Bakery. The line stretching down Arguello Boulevard on most mornings suggests customers reached the same conclusion long before the awards arrived. The kouign amann alone justifies the trip.
Named after the autostrada connecting Puglia to Naples, A16 has spent more than twenty years honoring the cooking traditions of Southern Italy with a fidelity that makes the word "authentic" feel insufficient. One of fewer than one hundred VPN-certified Neapolitan pizzerias in the United States. A wine list devoted entirely to Italy that is among the finest in the country. A chocolate budino tart I have ordered on every single visit for two decades. The restaurant most likely to make you book a flight to Campania.
Two restaurants, one philosophy: Greek cooking as it was meant to be — restrained, ingredient-focused, and built around wood fire. The mesquite-grilled lamb chops at Kokkari are the finest I have eaten outside of Greece. The avgolemono on a cold evening is the most comforting soup in the city. The fireplace in the evening turns the dining room into one of San Francisco's warmest spaces in every sense of the word. Open since 2000 and better than ever.
I have lost count of how many times I have eaten at Honda-Ya over the past decade. I have also stopped trying to count the menu items — there are well over 200 — and remarkably, nearly everything I have ordered has been outstanding. Honda-Ya is a Japanese izakaya that has been a fixture in Tustin for over thirty years, and it earns its place here not through a single transcendent meal but through something rarer: the kind of unwavering consistency that makes you return again and again without ever feeling like you have fully explored it. Order the gindara — sweet miso black cod that flakes into buttery layers and practically dissolves on your tongue. Order the kushiyaki skewers over binchōtan charcoal. Then order everything else.
Not every restaurant on this list needs to be a destination. Some earn their place by being exactly what they are, executed to perfection, every single time. Chef Sandro Nardone — whose family's cooking in Atina, Italy was so celebrated that Pope John Paul II came to the table — has transplanted that tradition to Southern California's coast. The bolognese is made the way they make it in Bologna. The pizza dough is as close to Naples as the Southern California air will allow, which turns out to be very close indeed. I have never had a bad meal here. Not once.
Mexico
For many travelers, securing a reservation at Pujol is the primary reason for visiting Mexico City. After stalking the calendar for months and securing a 9:30pm seating, I can confirm: it is worth it. Not because every dish was the best thing I ate in Mexico City — several meals elsewhere were equally surprising. Pujol's value lies in something larger. It tells a story about Mexico through ingredients, history, and technique that no other restaurant in the world could tell. The Mole Madre — maintained continuously since the restaurant opened, 3,280 days old on the evening of my visit — is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever tasted.
Italy
My logic was simple: pizza was invented in Naples, therefore the best pizza in the world must be in Naples. I was wrong by thirty miles. Franco Pepe's restaurant in the medieval hilltop town of Caiazzo is not simply a pizza restaurant — it is an argument for what pizza can be when you treat it as a form of culinary artistry rather than a category of food. The Margherita Sbagliata, the SUD Estate with bergamot oil and powdered black olives, the dessert pizza filled with buffalo ricotta and Vesuvio apricot jam. The journey to Caiazzo may require planning. It requires no justification.
Lo Scoglio is literally built over the water, with a private dock directly beneath the dining room where boats arrive from Capri, Positano, and Amalfi throughout the meal. The seafood comes from the surrounding waters each morning. The vegetables come from the family's farm up the hill. The Spaghetti alla Nerano — fried local zucchini, local cheese, pasta cooking water, nothing else — is a masterclass in restraint. I have been to restaurants with longer wine lists and more elaborate presentations. Very few achieve the sense of place that Lo Scoglio delivers. It is not merely a meal; it is an immersion into the Sorrento Peninsula itself.
Japan
Kaiseki is Japan's highest culinary art form — a tasting menu anchored in the season, the landscape, and centuries of Zen philosophy. Kikunoi Roan begins with kobako-kani snow crab available for only two months each year and ends with a Daishiro persimmon with a splash of cognac. Between those two moments, twelve courses unfold with a precision and beauty that rearrange your understanding of what food is for. The meal I ate here cannot be replicated. The ingredients will never be exactly the same again. That impermanence is the point. It is the most Japanese idea I have ever tasted.[Link to Kikunoi Roan post]
Thailand
Bangkok asks you to hold two ideas simultaneously: that street food eaten on a plastic stool can be as profound as anything in a formal dining room, and that formal dining rooms here can achieve things that almost no other cuisine in the world can. Nahm, Chef Pim Techamuanvivit's acclaimed restaurant, demonstrated extraordinary control of flavor across every course — the hidden rice noodles in the coconut cream dish, the charred squid with wild cardamom shoots, the Life Cycle of the Coconut dessert. Le Du, with its ceiling of 10,000 glass tubes filled with Thai grains and spices, offered a different argument: that Thai ingredients, handled with technical precision and genuine creativity, can produce some of the most exciting cooking on the planet. Both are right. Both belong here.
India
Tresind's sibling in Dubai was the first Indian restaurant in the world to earn three Michelin stars. The Mumbai location, where I finally secured a table after missing the Dubai reservation, delivered a meal of equal ambition. The pani puri prepared with dry ice. The duck and dosa waffle. The Kichdi of India — a dish that arrives as a map of the subcontinent, with ingredients from each region added one by one to tell the story of an entire nation through a single bowl of rice. Among the thousands of meals I have eaten around the world, this one remains among the most unforgettable.
Iceland
Dill was the meal that stayed with me long after I left Iceland. Iceland's first Michelin-starred restaurant, it is a celebration of the country's landscape, history, and culinary identity expressed through extraordinary craftsmanship and an unwavering commitment to sustainability. The broth that begins as kitchen waste and requires three days to transform. The smoked trout in a deep-fried laufabrauð shell — a Christmas bread cut by children's hands each winter. The cured lamb preserved for six weeks in dulse seaweed harvested from the North Atlantic. "The caviar of Iceland," the chefs called the winter-dried wolffish. They were not exaggerating. Only a handful of restaurants I have ever visited fundamentally changed the way I think about food. Dill is one of them.
Coming Soon
This list is not finished. Forthcoming additions include restaurants from Portugal, Spain, Peru, France, and elsewhere. Subscribe here and be the first to know when new entries are added.
If you have eaten somewhere that you believe belongs on a list like this, I would genuinely like to hear about it. The contact page is always open.
The greatest meals are not always the most expensive, the most decorated, or the most technically ambitious. They are the ones that make you feel, for a few hours, that you are exactly where you should be — that the world is larger and more extraordinary than you remembered, and that food, at its best, is one of the most generous things one person can offer another.
That is what this list is for.
A note on how to use this guide:
Each entry above links to a full post covering the restaurant in detail — the food, the story, the practical information for booking. The posts are the real thing. This page is just the door.
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